Sheil Kapadia

Philly.com

Every week during the regular season, I'm going to take a detailed look at Kevin Kolb's performance.

I've identified several different factors to measure, which you'll see below. This is a test run. I understand that it's the preseason, and while some of these things will factor into Kolb's regular-season performance, many of them will not.

Take a look and let me know what you think. If there are specific metrics you think I should measure that are not listed here, send me an e-mail and maybe I can account for them by Week 1 against the Packers.

PASS DISTRIBUTION

Targets

Catches

Yards

YAC

J. Maclin

11

3

39

13

J. Avant

5

3

26

8

K. Washington

2

1

7

3

M. Bell

2

1

3

3

L. McCoy

2

1

8

5

L. Weaver

1

1

5

0

B. Celek

1

1

10

4

D. Jackson

1

1

4

4

As you can see, Maclin was Kolb's favorite target. Eleven of his 25 pass attempts (44 percent) were in Maclin's direction. Of course, Jackson's injury in the first quarter had a lot to do with that. Maclin had a chance for a much better game, but dropped three pretty well-placed Kolb passes. As I mentioned in Man Up, Celek did not get a look from Kolb until the 44th offensive play. That's highly unlikely to happen in a regular season game.

Yards after the catch were not a big factor. The most YAC picked up on any given play was the 10-yard crossing pattern to Maclin, in which 8 of the yards were after the catch.

THE BLITZ, ETC.

Who says coaches keep everything vanilla in the preseason? The Chiefs blitzed Kolb on 11 of his 25 pass attempts. On those plays, Kolb was 5-for-11 for 57 yards and an interception. On the rest of his throws, Kolb was 6-for-14 for 46 yards.

In the first two preseason games, we saw Kolb make quite a few accurate throws while on the run. That didn't happen here. Kolb was 0-for-4 on attempts outside the pocket and 11-for-21 on throws in the pocket. Perhaps he was making a concerted effort to stay in the pocket until the last possible moment, after he admitted to leaving a little early at times against the Bengals.

Kolb did not have a lot of success in the shotgun. He was 4-for-12 for 44 yards on those attempts and 7-for-13 for 59 yards under center.

The Eagles had no success on play-action passes, as Kolb was 1-for-6 for 8 yards on those throws.

THIRD DOWN, RED ZONE

Perhaps no stat tells the story better than third down. Kolb was 0-for-7 on third-down attempts. On three of those throws, he targeted Maclin. On the other four, he looked for Avant, Washington, Bell and McCoy.

Kolb attempted three red-zone passes, and they were all incomplete.

SUCCESS BY DISTANCE

Here's a chart of Kolb's throws by distance. I used the same ranges that Football Outsiders uses so we'd have a point of reference. Short is 5 yards or less. Mid is 6 to 15 yards. Deep is 16 to 25 yards. And Bomb is more than 25 yards. These are measured from the line of scrimmage to the point where the ball is touched, hits the ground or goes out of bounds.

Completions

Attempts

Yards

Short

8

12

48

Mid

2

7

30

Deep

1

3

25

Bomb

0

3

0

With constant pressure, 12 of Kolb's 25 attempts (48 percent) were within a 5-yard window. He did complete a high percentage of those, especially when you consider two of the incompletions were on failed screen-pass attempts.

One of the bombs was the Maclin drop. Another was the interception that Kolb threw up for grabs.

OVERALL

Kolb was not sharp, but his teammates did not help him out. Three drops by Maclin and two false starts by Peters on third downs factored pretty heavily into the poor numbers. Same with the failed attempts to pick up blitzers. And Jackson getting knocked out after one play did not help either.

Again, it is the preseason, and the players on the offensive line could be different Week 1 against the Packers, depending on how much progress is made by Jamaal Jackson, Nick Cole and company.

So let me know what you think of the breakdown, and like I said, we can tweak once the real games start. It's still a work-in-progress at this point.

Oh, and thanks to friend and loyal MTC reader MC for coming up with the name for the feature. And to the future Mrs. MTC for putting together the spreadsheet that lets me chart this stuff.